1
A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
Once created, institutions often change in subtle and gradual ways over
time. Although less dramatic than abrupt and wholesale transformations, these slow and piecemeal changes can be equally consequential
for patterning human behavior and for shaping substantive political
outcomes. Consider, for example, the British House of Lords. This is
an institution that began to take shape in the thirteenth century out of
informal consultations between the Crown and powerful landowners.
By the early nineteenth century, membership was hereditary and the
chamber was fully institutionalized at the center of British politics.
Who would have thought that this deeply undemocratic assembly of
aristocrats would survive the transition to democracy? Not the early
Labour Party, which was founded in 1900 and understandably committed to the elimination of a chamber from which its constituents
were, more or less by definition, excluded.
We are grateful to the participants in the Workshop on “Explaining Institutional Change:
Ambiguity, Agency, and Power in Historical Institutionalism” at Northwestern University in October 2007. The empirical chapters presented at that event, and the stimulating
discussions they provoked, provided the inspiration for many of the ideas laid out in
this chapter. For subsequent written comments on this essay, we thank Tulia Falleti,
Peter Hall, Alan Jacobs, Adam Sheingate, Theda Skocpol, and Dan Slater. We benefited
as well from valuable input from Suzanne Berger, Nancy Bermeo, Giovanni Capoccia,
Bruce Carruthers, Edward Gibson, Desmond King, Richard Locke, Ann Orloff, Paul
Pierson, Dick Samuels, Ben Schneider, and the participants in the Comparative Historical Social Science workshop at Northwestern University and in seminars at Oxford
University and M.I.T.
1
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
Yet Labour did not dismantle the House of Lords – despite recurring
opportunities to do so during the twentieth century. Instead, the institution was reformed over time in a series of more measured moves that,
successively: circumscribed its powers (especially in 1911 by a Liberal
Party government), altered its composition (especially in 1958 under a
Conservative government, with the addition of life peerages), and rendered it less unwieldy and – in the eyes of some – more legitimate (in
2000 under a Labour government, by reducing dramatically the number of hereditary peers). The cumulative effects of these changes have
allowed the chamber not just to survive but to position itself as a significant player in, of all things, the defense of civil liberties in Britain
(The Economist, February 11, 2006, 51). This is quite a change –
from undemocratic bastion of traditional interests to champion of
individual rights – and it illustrates that incremental shifts often add
up to fundamental transformations.
While institutional analysis has earned a prominent place in contemporary social science, the vast literature that has accumulated provides
us with precious little guidance in making sense of processes of institutional change such as occurred in Britain’s House of Lords. We have
good theories of why various kinds of basic institutional configurations – constitutions, welfare systems, and property right arrangements – come into being in certain cases and at certain times. And we
have theories to explain those crucial moments when these institutional
configurations are upended and replaced with fundamentally new
ones. But still lacking are equally useful tools for explaining the more
gradual evolution of institutions once they have been established. Constitutions, systems of social provision, and property right arrangements
not only emerge and break down; they also evolve and shift in more
subtle ways across time. These kinds of gradual transformations, all
too often left out of institutionalist work, are the focus of this volume.
In the literature on institutional change, most scholars point to
exogenous shocks that bring about radical institutional reconfigurations, overlooking shifts based on endogenous developments that
often unfold incrementally. Indeed, these sorts of gradual or piecemeal
changes often only “show up” or “register” as change if we consider a
somewhat longer time frame than is characteristic in much of the literature. Moreover, when institutions are treated as causes, scholars are
too apt to assume that big and abrupt shifts in institutional forms are
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
3
more important or consequential than slow and incrementally occurring changes. As the chapters in this book show, these conclusions are
in need of fundamental rethinking. Gradual changes can be of great
significance in their own right; and gradually unfolding changes may
be hugely consequential as causes of other outcomes.
An emerging body of work provides ideas on which we can build
to understand gradual institutional change. New insights have grown
out of the literature on path dependence and the ensuing debate over
this framework (e.g., North 1990; Collier and Collier 1991; Arthur
1994; Clemens and Cook 1999; Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2004; Thelen
1999, 2004). Among other things, this work has led analysts to
theorize the circumstances under which institutions are – and are
not – subject to self-reinforcing “lock-in.” Important strands of this
literature suggest that path-dependent lock-in is a rare phenomenon,
opening up the possibility that institutions normally evolve in more
incremental ways. Likewise, works such as Pierson’s Politics in Time
(2004) discuss various slow-moving causal processes (e.g., cumulative causes, threshold effects, and causal chains) that do not evoke the
punctuated equilibrium model of change that is frequently embedded
in conceptualizations of path dependence (see also Aminzade 1992;
Abbott 2001). Inspired by these works, Streeck and Thelen (2005)
have offered an inventory of commonly observed patterns of gradual
institutional change that allows us to classify and compare cases across
diverse empirical settings.
If theorizing is going to reach its potential, however, institutional
analysts must go beyond classification to develop causal propositions
that locate the sources of institutional change – sources that are
not simply exogenous shocks or environmental shifts. Certain basic
questions must be addressed. Exactly what properties of institutions
permit change? How and why do the change-permitting properties
of institutions allow (or drive) actors to carry out behaviors that
foster the changes (and what are these behaviors)? How should we
conceptualize these actors? What types of strategies flourish in which
kinds of institutional environments? What features of the institutions
themselves make them more or less vulnerable to particular kinds of
strategies for change? Answering these basic questions is a critical next
step if scholars are to theorize the sources and varieties of endogenous
institutional change.
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
In this chapter, we advance answers to these questions. We begin
by noting that all leading approaches to institutional analysis – sociological institutionalism, rational-choice institutionalism, and historical
institutionalism (Hall and Taylor 1996) – face problems in explaining
institutional change. We then consider how a power-distributional
approach to institutions, common in historical institutionalism and
present as well in some strands of sociological and rational-choice
institutionalism, provides a basic motor for change. To account for
actual change, however, this power-distributional approach needs to
be supplemented with attention to issues of compliance going well
beyond the usual concern for level or extent of compliance. We argue
that institutional change often occurs precisely when problems of rule
interpretation and enforcement open up space for actors to implement
existing rules in new ways. Expanding our focus to include these concerns allows us to observe and theorize forms of incremental change
that are routinely overlooked in most institutional analysis.
Our discussion culminates in the presentation of a new model of
institutional change. The model elaborates a set of propositions that
link particular modes of incremental change to features of the institutional context and properties of institutions themselves that permit or
invite specific kinds of change strategies and change agents. The model
sees variations in institutional properties as encouraging different types
of change strategies, which are in turn associated with distinctive
change agents who work to foster specific kinds of incremental change.
The Challenge of Explaining Change
Despite many other differences, nearly all definitions of institutions
treat them as relatively enduring features of political and social life
(rules, norms, procedures) that structure behavior and that cannot be
changed easily or instantaneously. The idea of persistence of some
kind is virtually built into the very definition of an institution. This
is true for sociological, rational-choice, and historical-institutional
approaches alike. The connection between institutions and persistence
makes it natural for all of these approaches to focus on explaining continuity rather than change. Nevertheless, the three major institutional
approaches do vary in subtle ways in how they conceive of institutions
and this turns out to have important implications for their ability to
theorize institutional change.
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
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The Common Problem: A Focus on Stability and Exogenous Shocks
Sociological institutionalism considers a broad range of institutions,
focusing attention on noncodified, informal conventions and collective scripts that regulate human behavior. Definitions of institutions
in this tradition routinely spotlight their self-reproductive properties.
For example, according to Powell (1991, 197), “Things that are institutionalized tend to be relatively inert, that is, they resist efforts at
change”; for Jepperson (1991, 145), “Institutions are those social
patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-activating processes.” For some scholars in this broad tradition, institutions are tied to codes of appropriateness, and reproduction occurs as actors are socialized or otherwise learn to follow them
(March and Olsen 1984). For others, the self-reproducing properties of
institutions are cognitive in nature; institutions may be so routine and
“taken for granted” that they are beyond conscious scrutiny (Berger
and Luckmann 1967; Zucker 1983, 2). In addition, sociological institutionalists argue that actors often reproduce the same institutional
logic across various domains. With organizations, for instance, new
organizational forms are “isomorphic” with (i.e., similar to or compatible with) existing organizations (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Dobbin
1994; Scott 1995). Actors carry their existing scripts forward when
building new institutions even when doing so is not “efficient.”
While quite powerful as tools for explaining continuity, the mechanisms of perpetuation used in sociological institutionalism provide
few clues about possible sources of endogenous change. If a convention is reified, how might it change? If isomorphism encourages new
institutions to take the same form as old ones, where is the locus of
dynamism and innovation? To explain transformation, therefore, sociological institutionalists often point to an exogenous entity or force –
for example, new interpretive frames imported or imposed from the
outside (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Hannan and Freeman
1989) or the evolution of broader political, legal, and market “fields”
(Fligstein 1996). Studies of change in this genre often provide very
compelling accounts in which new actors manage to unsettle dominant practices or scripts and impose their preferred alternatives (e.g.,
Zorn et al. 2008). But what such accounts typically omit is a set of general propositions about what properties of institutional scripts make
some of them, at some times, more vulnerable than others to this type
of displacement.
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
Rational-choice institutionalists also face quandaries when confronted with institutional change. As Levi (2008) points out, “Rationalists have long recognized the importance of understanding equilibrium change, but their analyses have generally involved comparative
statics rather than a more dynamic approach” (see also Weingast 2002,
692). The basic difficulty here is related to a view of institutions as coordinating mechanisms that sustain particular equilibria (Shepsle 1989,
145; Calvert 1995, 218; Levi 1997, 27). As Greif and Laitin put it,
“A self-enforcing institution is one in which each player’s behavior
is a best response. The inescapable conclusion is that changes in selfenforcing institutions must have an exogenous origin” (2004, 633; see
also Bates et al. 1998, 8). This perspective has an obvious affinity to
punctuated equilibrium models of institutional change. But such models tend to draw a sharp line between the logic (and analysis) of institutional reproduction and that of change, and thus make it difficult to
conceptualize and theorize gradual processes of endogenous change.
Greif and Laitin’s (2004) work represents one of the most explicit
efforts to deal with the problem from a rational-choice perspective.
The analysis they offer stresses indirect institutional effects – or “feedback effects” – that either expand or reduce the set of situations in
which an institution is self-enforcing; thus, their solution to thinking about endogenous change is to redefine (some) of the exogenous
parameters as endogenous variables (i.e., “quasi-parameters”). Greif
and Laitin can in this way account for the stability (or breakdown) of
different institutional equilibria (their cases address the decline versus
the resiliency of social order in Venice and Genoa and the decline versus persistence of ethnic cleavages in Estonia and Nigeria). But their
framework does not make clear how scholars would be able, ex ante,
to distinguish quasi-parameters from parameters, or to identify which
quasi-parameters are more likely to be affected by the operation of the
institution.
Historical institutionalists have also grappled with the problem of
institutional change. And they have also traditionally stressed continuity over change. Much of the empirical work on path dependence,
for example, has been organized around explaining the persistence
of particular institutional patterns or outcomes, often over very long
stretches of time (for literature reviews, see Mahoney 2000; Pierson
2004; Thelen 2004). While historical institutionalists acknowledge the
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
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cultural components of institutions, as well as the coordinating functions that institutions may perform, these scholars view institutions
first and foremost as the political legacies of concrete historical struggles. Thus, most historical institutionalists embrace a power-political
view of institutions that emphasizes their distributional effects, and
many of them explain institutional persistence in terms of increasing
returns to power.
When it comes to explaining change, historical institutionalists frequently call attention to “critical junctures,” often understood as periods of contingency during which the usual constraints on action are
lifted or eased (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007). Explanations of change
focusing on such episodes are sometimes also linked to arguments
about the relative weight of agency versus structure in various phases.
Ira Katznelson, for example, sees institutions as mostly constraining in
periods of “stable” politics, but argues that critical junctures open up
opportunities for historic agents to alter the trajectory of development
(Katznelson 2003).
In other words, in the historical-institutionalist literature, too, scholars have tended to fall back on a discontinuous model of change in
which enduring historical pathways are periodically punctuated by
moments of agency and choice. These arguments thus often have the
same drawbacks as discussed earlier for other punctuated equilibrium
models, obscuring endogenous sources of change and encouraging us
to conceive of change as involving the “breakdown” of one set of
institutions and its replacement with another.
All three varieties of institutionalism, in short, provide answers to
what sustains institutions over time as well as compelling accounts of
cases in which exogenous shocks or shifts prompt institutional change.
What they do not provide is a general model of change, particularly
one that can comprehend both exogenous and endogenous sources of
change.
Institutional Stability as a Political Problem and a Dynamic
Political Outcome
If institutions are changed not just in response to exogenous shocks or
shifts, then their basic properties must be defined in ways that provide
some dynamic element that permits such change. The foundation on
which we build here is one that conceives institutions above all else as
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
distributional instruments laden with power implications (Hall 1986;
Skocpol 1995; Mahoney 2010; see also Hall [this volume]). As noted,
this view of institutions is commonplace in historical institutionalism but it is also consistent with some rational-choice perspectives
that emphasize power over cooperation (e.g., Knight 1992; Acemoglu,
Johnson, and Robinson 2005; Moe 2005), as well as some sociological accounts that focus on the political-distributional underpinnings of specific cultural or normative practices (e.g., Stinchcombe
1987, Fligstein forthcoming). In our approach, institutions are fraught
with tensions because they inevitably raise resource considerations and
invariably have distributional consequences. Any given set of rules or
expectations – formal or informal – that patterns action will have
unequal implications for resource allocation, and clearly many formal
institutions are specifically intended to distribute resources to particular kinds of actors and not to others. This is true for precisely those
institutions that mobilize significant and highly valued resources (e.g.,
most political and political-economic institutions).
Existing work has drawn out many implications of this conceptualization for understanding institutional genesis and continuity. Concerning genesis, actors with different endowments of resources are
normally motivated to pursue the creation of different kinds of institutions. And the institutions that are actually created often reflect
the relative contributions of – and often conflict among – these differentially motivated actors. In some cases, the power of one group
(or coalition) relative to another may be so great that dominant
actors are able to design institutions that closely correspond to their
well-defined institutional preferences. But institutional outcomes need
not reflect the goals of any particular group; they may be the unintended outcome of conflict among groups or the result of “ambiguous compromises” among actors who can coordinate on institutional
means even if they differ on substantive goals (Schickler 2001; Palier
2005).
For these reasons, there is nothing automatic, self-perpetuating, or
self-reinforcing about institutional arrangements. Rather, a dynamic
component is built in; where institutions represent compromises or
relatively durable though still contested settlements based on specific
coalitional dynamics, they are always vulnerable to shifts. On this view,
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
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change and stability are in fact inextricably linked. Those who benefit from existing arrangements may have an objective preference for
continuity but ensuring such continuity requires the ongoing mobilization of political support as well as, often, active efforts to resolve institutional ambiguities in their favor (Thelen 2004). Dan Slater’s analysis
(this volume) of the stability of authoritarianism in Indonesia under
Suharto is an excellent case in point. The phenomenal durability of
this regime was not a matter of self-enforcement or even of increasing
returns to power; rather, this outcome depended on the active creation
and nurturing of (over time, different) coalitions and institutional supports for the regime. Ironically, as Slater shows, the political balancing
that allowed Suharto to concentrate autocratic power paved the way
for later regime collapse by compromising the independent coercive
capacities of the co-opted institutions and organizations.
Given a view of institutional stability that rests not just on the
accumulation but also on the ongoing mobilization of resources, one
important source of change will be shifts in the balance of power (e.g.,
Knight 1992, 145, 184; Thelen 1999). This can happen in straightforward ways as, for instance, through changes in environmental conditions that reshuffle power relations. Beyond this, however, a number
of scholars have drawn attention to less obvious aspects of such shifts,
emphasizing for example that actors are embedded in a multiplicity
of institutions, and interactions among them may allow unforeseen
changes in the ongoing distribution of resources. Resource allocations from one set of institutions may shape the outcomes of distributional conflicts over resource allocations connected to a different
set of institutions. Pierson and Skocpol (2002, 696) note the importance of hypothesizing “about the combined effects of institutions and
processes rather than examining just one institution or process at a
time.” Actors disadvantaged by one institution may be able to use
their advantaged status vis-à-vis other institutions to enact change.
Other strands of scholarship in this broad tradition examine how the
expected operation of institutions itself sometimes generates pressures
for change. This can occur if the over-time distributional effects of
institutions trigger divisions among institutional power holders. Or
change can occur if institutions disadvantage subordinate groups to the
point that they organize and come to identity with one another, thereby
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
increasing their power and capacity to break prevailing institutional
arrangements. Between them, these two possibilities correspond to the
themes of “divided elites” and “united subordinate groups” that are
sometimes emphasized in explanations of change (e.g., Yashar 1997).
Compliance as a Variable in the Analysis of Institutional Change
Beyond balance-of-power shifts (either exogenous or endogenously
generated through feedback effects), we especially call attention to
forms of change that are linked to issues of compliance. On this point
there is a rather important difference between the power-distributional
perspective of institutions we are advancing here and some prominent
alternatives discussed earlier. In some versions of sociological institutionalism, for example, compliance and enforcement appear to be
nonissues. If institutions involve cognitive templates that individuals
unconsciously enact, then actors presumably do not think about not
complying.1 In fact, it is their very taken-for-grantedness that makes
these institutions self-enforcing. In rationalist accounts, sanctions and
monitoring do play a role as mechanisms to prevent free riding and
promote collective action (Ostrom 1990). However, in much of this
work, compliance is built into the definition of the institution under
consideration. In other words, what institutions do is stabilize expectations (among other ways, by providing information about the probable
behavior of others), and thus enforcement is endogenous in the sense
that the expected costs and extent of noncompliance are factored into
the strategic behavior of the actors in a particular institutional equilibrium (North 1990, 1993).
If, instead, we break with a view of institutions as self-reinforcing
(through whatever mechanism) and put distributional issues front and
center, compliance emerges as a variable, and a variable that is crucially important to the analysis of both stability and change. The need
to enforce institutions carries its own dynamic of potential change,
emanating not just from the politically contested nature of institutional
rules but also, importantly, from a degree of openness in the interpretation and implementation of these rules. Even when institutions are
1
We owe this insight regarding compliance and its different valence in different varieties
of institutionalism to Wolfgang Streeck, who made these points at a workshop on
institutions held in Italy in 2006.
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formally codified, their guiding expectations often remain ambiguous
and always are subject to interpretation, debate, and contestation.2
It is not just that unambiguous rules are enforced to greater and
lesser degrees. Rather, struggles over the meaning, application, and
enforcement of institutional rules are inextricably intertwined with the
resource allocations they entail.
In many cases, there is simply a great deal of “play” in the interpreted meaning of particular rules or in the way the rules are instantiated in practice. This view parts ways with power-oriented rationalist
accounts like that of Knight, who acknowledges the ambiguity of rules
as a site of conflict but who assumes that such ambiguity will decline
over time (1992, 76, 186) or be resolved through the formalization of
the rules (1992, 176) or both. We see ambiguity as a more permanent
feature, even where rules are formalized. Actors with divergent interests will contest the openings this ambiguity provides because matters
of interpretation and implementation can have profound consequences
for resource allocations and substantive outcomes. As abortion politics
in the United States (associated with the defense of “individual rights”
and attached to different beliefs on when “life” is taken to begin) amply
demonstrates, competing interpretations of one and the same rule can
mobilize quite different coalitions (see also Weir 1992). Coalitions
form not only as representatives of alternative institutions but also
as movements seeking particular interpretations of the ambiguous or
contested rules of a given institution.
Existing historical-institutional work and especially the contributions in this volume suggest several implications that follow from treating compliance as a variable in this expanded sense. First, compliance
is inherently complicated by the fact that rules can never be precise
enough to cover the complexities of all possible real-world situations.
When new developments confound rules, existing institutions may be
changed to accommodate the new reality. These changes can involve
rule creation, or they may simply entail creative extensions of existing
rules to the new reality. This insight and its implications for institutional change are underscored by Adam Sheingate’s contribution to
2
The ambiguity of institutional rules is also a theme in a recent edited volume by
Skowronek and Glassman (2007). Beyond the introduction by the editors, see especially the essays by Sheingate (2007) and Carpenter and Moore (2007) in that volume.
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
this volume. Sheingate’s analysis focuses on key changes in the rules
governing the U.S. Congress. He challenges a large body of work that
sees congressional rules as mechanisms that allow actors to coordinate
among themselves – above all, to credibly commit to one another to
achieve joint gains (Weingast and Marshall1988). Such accounts presuppose unambiguous rules; differences in the content of rules produce
different equilibrium outcomes.
By contrast, Sheingate sees rules as ambiguous and therefore themselves the objects of political skirmishing. While these rules certainly
establish important constraints on action, Sheingate emphasizes that
they are not unequivocal. The ambiguities they embody provide critical
openings for creativity and agency; individuals exploit their inherent
openness to establish new precedents for action that can “transform
the way institutions allocate power and authority” (Sheingate, this
volume). Through three episodes of institutional change, Sheingate
shows how actors devised new applications and interpretations of old
rules in order to bend outcomes in their preferred direction. In each
instance, the new interpretation had massively important implications
for congressional decision-making structures, in particular for the relative power of the Speaker of the House and minorities within the
legislature.
A second, closely related point concerns the cognitive limits of
actors themselves. Even when institutional rules have been created to
accommodate relatively complex situations, actors face informationprocessing limitations and certainly cannot anticipate all of the possible
future situations in which rules written now will be implemented later.
The account in this volume by Alan Jacobs of the development of U.S.
Social Security provides a case in point. He shows that FDR initially
devised the idea of contributory financing on which the system was
based as a way of fending off the challenges that elites at that time
faced from populists. Contributory financing made it impossible for
politicians to expand the program recklessly in response to populist
urges. Years later, long after the populist threat had waned, these same
provisions provided an unanticipated safeguard against conservative
retrenchment. As Jacobs emphasizes, the contributory principle contained within it multiple moral and political logics, not all of which
were anticipated by its designers but which later proved crucial to
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
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the (changing) coalitions that both sustained and reshaped this set of
institutions over the longer run.
Third, institutions are always embedded in assumptions that are
often only implicit. Emile Durkheim’s notion of “the non-contractual
basis of contracts” points to these implicit understandings held by the
relevant community that are necessary for rules to have efficacy. Such
shared understandings may exist to differing degrees and may themselves shift over time, which can often trigger a de facto institutional
change even though formal rules remain intact. This is a major message of Ato Onoma (this volume), who notes that in the absence of
such shared understandings, institutional “predators” can systematically undermine rules by exploiting their letter while violating their
spirit. Here we need to recognize that institutional stability ultimately
depends not only on continuity in the rules themselves but also on the
ways in which those rules are instantiated in practice (Hacker 2005;
Streeck and Thelen 2005).
Fourth, the fact that rules are not just designed but also have to
be applied and enforced, often by actors other than the designers,
opens up space (as both an analytic and a practical matter) for change
to occur in a rule’s implementation or enactment. Robert Lieberman
(2006) has provided an excellent example of this in his analysis of
equal opportunity/affirmative action legislation in the United States.
Lieberman documents that the provision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act
that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
was deeply contested and nearly failed. A political compromise, the
version that Congress did pass was weak in the extreme, more or
less by design. Once enacted, however, bureaucrats charged with the
implementation and enforcement of the legislation worked with civil
rights groups to bring cases to courts, which then, through expansive
interpretations of the law, stretched the parameters and scope of the
legislation. The result was to transform a weak legislative rule into
one of the strongest affirmative action regimes in the world. The general point is that enforcers must decide how and when rules are to
be implemented, and this implies possibilities for change – in both
directions as it were, either through “slippage” or through expansive interpretations and applications. Actors such as the bureaucracy
and the judiciary, charged with implementation, interpretation, and
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
enforcement, have large roles to play in shaping institutional evolution
(see also Carpenter 2001).
In short, we propose that the basic properties of institutions contain
within them possibilities for change. What animates change is the
power-distributional implications of institutions. However, where we
expect incremental change to emerge is precisely in the “gaps” or
“soft spots” between the rule and its interpretation or the rule and
its enforcement. This is an analytic space that other conceptions of
institutions (as behaviors in equilibrium, or as scripts) essentially rule
out by definition, but as a practical matter this is exactly the space in
which contests over – and at the same time within – institutions take
place (Thelen 2009).
The emphasis on compliance also opens new avenues for theorizing
the actors and the coalitions that drive institutional change. Clearly,
institutional “winners” and “losers” have different interests when it
comes to interpreting rules or dedicating resources to their enforcement. But more important for the analysis of institutional change,
compliance problems can blur the lines between winners and losers.
When the enforcement of an institution is contested and uncertain, or
when the meaning of an institution is undecided, an actor’s interest in
institutional continuity may be equivocal and mutable. As the meaning
and enactment of an institution change, so too may actor preferences.
Putting issues of compliance at center stage, then, forces us to think
about the distributional effects of institutions in more complicated
ways than simply “winners” and “losers.” New categories that go
beyond this simple dichotomy must be created to depict and analyze
the actors, coalitional patterns, and political conflicts that drive the
politics of institutional change. Carrying out this conceptual work is
among the tasks we pursue in the next section.
Explaining Patterns of Institutional Change
A distributional approach suggests that dynamic tensions and pressures
for change are built into institutions. However, the approach does
not itself specify the different modes of change that such dynamism
permits or unleashes. Nor does it embody an explanation for why
one kind of change occurs rather than another. The purpose of this
section is accordingly to build on the discussion so far by offering a
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
15
Characteristics
of
Political Context
III
II
Type of Dominant
Change-Agent
Type of
Institutional
Change
Characteristics
of
Institution
I
figure 1.1. Framework for Explaining Modes of Institutional Change.
new framework for identifying and explaining types of institutional
change.
Our basic model is sketched in Figure 1.1. Here the characteristics
of both the political context and the institution in question together
drive the type of institutional change we can expect. Political context
and institutional form have these effects because they shape the type of
dominant change agent that is likely to emerge and flourish in any specific institutional context, and the kinds of strategies this agent is likely
to pursue to effect change. In the following discussion, we elaborate
this argument, focusing our remarks on the three key causal connections identified in Figure 1.1 (indicated by I, II, and III in the figure). We
begin, though, by considering different modes of institutional change.
Modes of Institutional Change
Following Streeck and Thelen (2005), we delineate four modal types
of institutional change: displacement, layering, drift, and conversion.
As Table 1.1 suggests, each type is defined by asking about the locus
of institutional transformation. The dimensions in the table generate
the four types:
1. Displacement: the removal of existing rules and the introduction
of new ones
2. Layering: the introduction of new rules on top of or alongside
existing ones
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
16
table 1.1. Types of Gradual Change
Removal of old rules
Neglect of old rules
Changed impact/enactment
of old rules
Introduction of new rules
Displacement
Layering
Drift
Conversion
Yes
–
–
No
No
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
No
3. Drift: the changed impact of existing rules due to shifts in the
environment
4. Conversion: the changed enactment of existing rules due to their
strategic redeployment
Understanding these different types of institutional change – including
the roles that institutional supporters and challengers typically play
within each – sets the stage for explaining why and how one type
rather than another typically occurs.
Displacement is present when existing rules are replaced by new
ones. This kind of change may well be abrupt, and it may entail the
radical shift that is often featured in leading institutional theories. The
rapid, sudden breakdown of institutions and their replacement with
new ones that accompanies revolutions obviously involves displacement. Yet displacement can also be a slow-moving process. This may
occur when new institutions are introduced and directly compete with
(rather than supplement) an older set of institutions. New institutions
are often introduced by actors who were “losers” under the old system.
If institutional supporters of the old system prove unable to prevent
defection to the new rules, then gradual displacement may take place.
For instance, the advance of market-oriented institutions in China and
Cuba pits a new institutional system against an older one. As more
and more actors defect to the market institutions, they may erode and
slowly overtake the previous state-controlled arrangements.
Layering occurs when new rules are attached to existing ones,
thereby changing the ways in which the original rules structure behavior (Schickler 2001; Thelen 2003). Different from displacement, layering does not introduce wholly new institutions or rules, but rather
involves amendments, revisions, or additions to existing ones. Such
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
17
layering can, however, bring substantial change if amendments alter
the logic of the institution or compromise the stable reproduction of
the original “core.” For example, adding a voucher option to an existing school system while maintaining other features intact is likely to set
in motion changes that over time interfere with the stable reproduction of neighborhood-based schools and associated local financing.
Processes of layering often take place when institutional challengers
lack the capacity to actually change the original rules (or, as in displacement, to set up an explicit alternative institution or system). They
instead work within the existing system by adding new rules on top of
or alongside old ones. While defenders of the status quo may be able to
preserve the original rules, they are unable to prevent the introduction
of amendments and modifications. Each new element may be a small
change in itself, yet these small changes can accumulate, leading to a
big change over the long run.
Drift occurs when rules remain formally the same but their impact
changes as a result of shifts in external conditions (Hacker 2005).
When actors choose not to respond to such environmental changes,
their very inaction can cause change in the impact of the institution.
For instance, shifts in population across established electoral districts
in many democracies can lead to problems of malapportionment, distorting election outcomes by magnifying the representation of some
constituencies over others. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party
consolidated and maintained its dominance in electoral politics in
part by actively neglecting to reapportion Diet seats toward cities in
response to urbanization. Politicians who resist efforts to revise district
boundaries in the face of population movements are promoting change
through drift, since their inaction has the effect of altering substantive
outcomes.3
Conversion occurs when rules remain formally the same but are
interpreted and enacted in new ways (Thelen 2003). This gap between
the rules and their instantiation is not driven by neglect in the face of
a changed setting (as is true with drift); instead, the gap is produced
by actors who actively exploit the inherent ambiguities of the institutions. Through redeployment, they convert the institution to new
3
We thank Alan Renwick and Giovanni Capoccia for this example.
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
goals, functions, or purposes. The “old institutionalism” in sociology is replete with examples of institutional innovators working with
existing materials to craft solutions to new problems. In some cases,
conversion results from the incorporation of new supporters or the
assumption of power by a new political coalition that, rather than
dismantle old institutions, uses them in new ways (Selznick 1949).
Think of the way the YMCA was redirected over a long period of time
and in response to secularization from a primarily religious mission to
a broader-based community-oriented organization (Zald and Denton
1963; Zald 1970). In this case, new elites came to power and orchestrated the shift from within. However, in some cases even those who
are disadvantaged by an institution can get traction out of conversion
strategies. Lacking the capacity to destroy an institution, institutional
challengers may be able to exploit its inherent ambiguities in ways
that allow them to redirect it toward more favorable functions and
effects.
Link I: Political Context, Institutional Characteristics,
and Modes of Change
Differences in the character of existing institutional rules as well as in
the prevailing political context affect the likelihood of specific types
of change. The key issue is how to conceptualize the dimensions of
institutions and of political context that matter the most for explaining
variations in modes of institutional change. We can ask two broad
questions:
1. Does the political context afford defenders of the status quo
strong or weak veto possibilities?
2. Does the targeted institution afford actors opportunities for
exercising discretion in interpretation or enforcement?
The answers to these two questions produce the analytic space depicted
in Table 1.2, which we adopt (with modifications) from Hacker (2005).
As the table suggests, differences in veto possibilities and the extent of
discretion in institutional enforcement and interpretation are associated with different modes of institutional change.
Taking each dimension separately, let us first discuss the issue
of veto possibilities, which can derive either from especially powerful veto players or from numerous institutional veto points (e.g.,
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
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table 1.2. Contextual and Institutional Sources of Institutional Change
Characteristics of the Targeted Institution
Low Level of
Discretion in
Interpretation/
Enforcement
High Level of
Discretion in
Interpretation/
Enforcement
Strong
Veto
Possibilities
Layering
Drift
Weak
Veto
Possibilities
Displacement
Conversion
Characteristics of
the Political Context
Tsebelis 2002). Either way, veto possibilities are high where there exist
actors who have access to institutional or extrainstitutional means of
blocking change. These actors may have access to veto capabilities
regarding both changes in the (formal or informal) rules themselves
and changes in the rules’ enactment in practice. Actors with strong
veto capabilities vis-à-vis a given institution, however, may not enjoy
this strength vis-à-vis other institutions. For example, an independent
central bank may be a powerful veto player with respect to changes in
financial institutions but not welfare institutions.
Where would-be agents of change face political contexts with myriad veto possibilities, it will be difficult for them to mobilize the
resources and assemble a coalition that can displace the existing institutional rules. Hence, displacement is unlikely in the context of strong
veto possibilities. Likewise, efforts at active conversion will be difficult
in such a context, since veto powers also apply to the realm of rule
enactment. Instead of displacement or conversion, drift and layering
are more promising as strategies of change in political environments
with strong veto players. This is true because drift and layering do not
require making any direct changes to the old institutions and do not
rely on altering the rules themselves or actively shifting their enactment.
With drift, institutional change grows out of the neglect of an institution, or more precisely, the failure to adapt and update an institution
so as to maintain its traditional impact in a changed environment. Powerful veto players may be able to defend existing institutions against
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
outright displacement, but their veto powers are often insufficient to
prevent drift since doing so typically requires supporters to take active
steps to shore up support for an institution as the social, economic, or
political context shifts. Monarchical political institutions, for instance,
were gradually rendered into mere institutional vestiges as royal powers time and time again proved unable to successfully defend the old
ways in a changing environment marked by rising parliamentary forms
and their supporters.
With layering, institutional change grows out of the attachment
of new institutions or rules onto or alongside existing ones. While
powerful veto players can protect the old institutions, they cannot
necessarily prevent the addition of new elements. Thus, for example,
Social Democrats across Europe have successfully prevented conservatives from dismantling public pension schemes, but they have not
been able to stop the addition of voluntary supplemental pensions
alongside the public system, which conservatives hope will tilt the balance toward the latter over the longer run (Clark and Whiteside 2003;
Hacker 2005).
The other explanatory dimension concerns differences in the extent
to which institutions are open to contending interpretations and variations in their enforcement. As we have argued, adopting a distributional approach to institutions means treating compliance with institutional rules as a variable that can change over time. In practice,
nevertheless, the degree to which actors have discretion in implementing rules will vary from one institution to the next.4 For example,
enforcing and implementing unemployment benefits typically involve
some discretion on the part of those who administer such benefits. If
benefits are attached to a requirement that recipients be “actively seeking work,” what exactly does that mean (King 1995)? If workers can
receive benefits only so long as they cannot find “appropriate alternative employment,” what types of jobs might a person be expected
to take? The sources of variation in the scope of discretion that rules
allow are of course themselves quite varied: the complexity of the rules,
the kinds of behaviors regulated by the rules, the extent of resources
4
The degree of discretion embedded in different institutional configurations also “maps
onto” broad differences between common law and civil law traditions. The importance
of this difference for a variety of substantive outcomes has been explored by a number
of scholars (e.g., La Porta et al. 1998 for finance and development).
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
21
mobilized by the rules, and so on, all matter. In the present context,
however, we are concerned simply with the variation in the extent of
discretion that actors have at the interpretation and enforcement levels
and not with identifying the sources of such variation.
Differences in levels of discretion in the interpretation or enforcement of rules help explain modes of institutional change. If would-be
agents of change face an institution in which there is very little room for
discretion in enforcement, then the outcomes of conversion and drift
are less likely. Conversion normally occurs when rules are ambiguous
enough to permit different (often starkly contrasting) interpretations.
As scholars of American political development have noted, contending
interpretations of the Constitution’s commerce clause (a simple oneliner that gives Congress power “to regulate commerce with foreign
nations and among the several states”) have been harnessed in support
of rather massive changes in economic and social policy in the United
States, including the consolidation of labor rights during the New Deal
as well as important advances in civil rights in the 1960s (Orren 1991;
Mettler 1998; Skrentny 2002).5
Drift can occur when a gap opens up between rules and enforcement (in this case, often a gap due to neglect). For example, and as
observers of labor relations in the United States have noted, different
presidential administrations have been associated with wildly different
outcomes with respect to workplace safety, depending on how vigorously the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
enforces existing laws. The same observation has been made about
union organizing under different presidents, depending on whom they
appoint to lead the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that is
charged with interpreting and enforcing labor laws in this country
(see, especially, Freeman 1985; Klein and Wagner 1985, esp. 79–83;
Moe 1987). In those cases and many others like them, there is tremendous space for diverse outcomes even under stable rules, given different interpretations (narrow/broad) and enforcement (vigorous/lax) of
those rules.
In short, administrative capacities may be especially important for
conversion and drift, because weakness on these fronts can create
5
And since the 1990s, interpretations of the commerce clause have taken another,
conservative, turn – being used by the Rehnquist Court to limit the areas in which
Congress can legislate. We thank Dan Galvin for this observation.
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
strategic openings for those who oppose the rules on the books. By
contrast, the other two modes of change, layering and displacement,
do not rely on exploiting ambiguities in the rules themselves. These
outcomes are likely strategies for change agents who realize that transformation cannot occur by taking advantage of a disjuncture between
rules and enforcement. With layering, the old institution remains in
place but is amended through the introduction of new rules. With
displacement, the old institution is simply replaced – outright and
abruptly or gradually over time. Either way, change occurs in a manner that does not entail shifting the interpretation or enforcement of
rules that remain intact.
Link II: Change Agents and Institutional Change
Addressing questions of institutional change and contemplating the
kinds of strategies that are most likely to drive such change in diverse
institutional settings also raises the question: exactly who are the agents
behind such change? And why do they carry out behavior that leads
to transformation? From a distributional perspective on institutions,
as we have seen, a starting answer is that institutional losers drive
change precisely because they benefit from such change. Yet we have
also seen how the notion of winners and losers is often too simple for real situations. The ambiguities inherent in institutions and
the uncertainties concerning institutional enactment complicate assessments about which actors are advantaged and disadvantaged. And the
fact that actors are simultaneously embedded in multiple institutions
often leaves them winners in some arenas but losers in others. We need
a framework for thinking about change agents that goes beyond the
crude dichotomy between winners and losers.
We also need to disentangle actors’ short-run behaviors from their
long-run strategies.6 We should not, for example, confuse immediate
rule-conforming behavior with the overall goal of institutional maintenance. Actors may, instead, pursue a strategy of short-run conformity in the service of long-run insurrectionary goals. We further need
to be mindful that institutional change need not emerge from actors
with transformational motives. Rather, institutional change can be an
6
We thank Alan Jacobs for emphasizing the importance of this to us.
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table 1.3. Types of Change Agents
Insurrectionaries
Symbionts
Subversives
Opportunists
Seeks to Preserve
Institution
Follows Rules of
Institution
No
Yes
No
Yes/No
No
No
Yes
Yes/No
unintended by-product that grows out of distributional struggles in
which no party explicitly sought the changes that eventually occurred.
We find it useful to posit four basic change agents: insurrectionaries, symbionts (either parasitic or mutualistic), subversives, and
opportunists.7 We define these actors formally by asking two basic
questions:
1. Does the actor seek to preserve the existing institutional rules?
2. Does the actor abide by the institutional rules?
The answers to these questions link up to the strategies just discussed
and are specified in Table 1.3.
Identifying change agents is useful for explanatory purposes: each
agent type is associated with a particular mode of institutional change,
as well as a particular preferred strategy for effecting such change.
These associations exist because the contrasting interests or behaviors
of the change agents vis-à-vis institutional continuity foster different
patterns of change. In other words, different types of change agents
emerge in different institutional contexts, and where they are successful
specific modes of institutional change are likely to follow.
Insurrectionaries consciously seek to eliminate existing institutions
or rules, and they do so by actively and visibly mobilizing against
them. They reject the institutional status quo and do not always abide
by its regulations. Insurrectionaries may be especially likely to emerge
when groups of individuals are disadvantaged by multiple institutions
that reinforce one another, linking their identities to overall positions
7
Clearly, any given actor may occupy different roles in the context of different institutional politics – for example, adopting an opportunist stance in one arena but
assuming the role of insurrectionary in another context or at another time. Thus, the
change agents we identify refer to roles rather than fixed identities.
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
within complexes of institutions. These objective similarities can provide a basis for subjective identification and thus coordinated collective
action.
The insurrectionary variety of institutional innovator is widely theorized and represents the way that many institutionalists think about
change agents when explaining abrupt patterns of change. Indeed,
when insurrectionaries prevail in conflicts, they may lead criticaljuncture periods that see the rapid overturning of the institutional
status quo in favor of radically new rules. Insurrectionaries, therefore,
may be especially linked to patterns of outright displacement. Moreover, the rapid displacement of institutions is precisely their goal. If
displacement occurs gradually, it is likely because insurrectionaries are
unable to make things change as quickly as they would like.
Symbionts come in two varieties – parasitic and mutualistic – and
in both instances rely (and thrive) on institutions not of their own
making. In the parasitic variety, these actors exploit an institution for
private gain even as they depend on the existence and broad efficacy
of the institution to achieve this gain. While they rely on the preservation of the institution, parasites themselves carry out actions that
contradict the “spirit” or purpose of the institution, thus undermining it over the longer run. Parasites can flourish in settings where
expectations about institutional conformity are high, but the actual
capacity to enforce those expectations is limited. Indeed, parasites will
not persist if institutional supporters are able to maintain and shore
up institutions to address these gaps in compliance. As a result, parasites are especially associated with drift, or the neglect of institutional
maintenance in the face of slippage between rule and practices on the
ground.
In their mutualistic incarnations, symbionts also thrive on and
derive benefit from rules they did not write or design, using these
rules in novel ways to advance their interests. In this case, however,
symbionic activity does not compromise the efficiency of the rules or
the survival of the institution. Rather, mutualists violate the letter of
the rule to support and sustain its spirit – in contrast to parasites, who
exploit the letter of the rule while violating its spirit.8 Mutualists are
not associated with institutional change through drift; in fact, they
8
We thank Bruce Carruthers for underscoring the alternative possibility.
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
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ordinarily contribute to the robustness of institutions, expanding the
support coalition on which the institution rests.9
The chapter in this volume by Ato Onoma provides a vivid illustration of the logic of the parasitic variety of symbiont agency and
its implications for institutional stability and change. Onoma contests prevailing accounts of property rights institutions as rationally
designed to secure efficient economic outcomes. In line with the view
of institutions advanced in this volume, he instead depicts property
rights regimes as laden with conflict. He shows that in Kenya “con
men” and “tricksters” systematically exploited a newly institutionalized system of land documentation, playing on people’s beliefs in the
validity of documents to defraud them by exchanging fake documents
for money. Kenya’s property rights regime thus underwent drift, as
politicians systematically neglected slippage in the enactment of the
regime. Indeed, far from bringing the full powers of the state to bear
to suppress such parasitic behavior, politicians themselves embraced
the logic and the strategies of these con men, exchanging protection of
property for political support. In cases like this, parasitic behavior (as
in the natural world) can compromise the stability of the system itself.
For while stable property rights might survive isolated infractions of
this sort, the multiplication of fraudulent claims compromises the very
beliefs on which the fraudulent practices rely. The result for Kenya, as
Dan Slater colorfully noted at the workshop out of which this volume
grew, was “the tragedy of the con men.”
Subversives are actors who seek to displace an institution, but in
pursuing this goal they do not themselves break the rules of the institution. They instead effectively disguise the extent of their preference
for institutional change by following institutional expectations and
working within the system. From the outside, they may even appear
9
Mutualists are sometimes therefore associated (like opportunists, discussed later) with
conversion. In some cases, the emergence of symbionts is a function of feedback
effects, as actors who were not involved in an institution’s design become invested
in the institution and develop an interest in its survival. Thelen’s (2004) study of
vocational training in Germany provides an example. The country’s union movement
opposed the creation of a firm-based training system in the late nineteenth century,
but as the ranks of unions swelled with workers who had earned their credentials
in that system, the unions developed an interest in maintaining and controlling this
institution rather than dismantling it. The overall result was to render the system more
robust by expanding its support coalition.
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
to be supporters of the institutions. But they bide their time, waiting for the moment when they can actively move toward a stance of
opposition. As they wait, they may encourage institutional changes
by promoting new rules on the edges of old ones, thus siphoning off
support for the previous arrangements. In this sense, subversives may
be especially associated with patterns of layering, in which new institutional elements are grafted onto old ones. Yet depending on the
features of the political-institutional context, they may also encourage
institutional conversion and the kinds of neglect that promote institutional drift. Either way, subversion brings change as developments on
the periphery make their way to the center.
Chapter 2 (this volume) by Tulia Falleti provides an illustration of
change via subversion. As she demonstrates, the shift in Brazil from
a fragmented (but centralized) health care system to a universal (but
decentralized) regime did not take place abruptly with the nation’s
transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Instead, she identifies
long-percolating developments at the local level during the authoritarian period, in which advocates of a municipality-based system infiltrated the existing institutions and laid the foundation for a wholly
different kind of regime. While operating within the broad parameters of the existing system, these activists exploited crucial gaps and
openings for action at the local level to put in place a more decentralized system alongside and within the existing system, but whose
logic was completely different from the prevailing one. The actions
of subversives were crucial to later outcomes, and yet it is important to underscore that these changes were not the result of heroic
agents operating “against all odds.” Rather, as Falleti makes clear,
there were significant features of the previous authoritarian institutions (above all, the attempt to penetrate the countryside) that proved
crucial to the ability of subversives to work against the system from
within it.
Finally, opportunists are actors who have ambiguous preferences
about institutional continuity. They do not actively seek to preserve
institutions. However, because opposing the institutional status quo is
costly, they also do not try to change the rules. Opportunists instead
exploit whatever possibilities exist within the prevailing system to
achieve their ends. Indeed, the weight of opportunists within an institution can be a major source of institutional inertia. Their preference for
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
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making use of existing possibilities over the riskier strategy of mobilizing for change makes opportunists – through their inaction – “natural”
(de facto) allies of an institution’s supporters. Thus, beyond the power
asymmetries noted earlier, opportunists help explain why changing an
institutional status quo is often far more difficult than defending it.10
When they do emerge as agents of change, opportunists often engage
in strategies of conversion: ambiguities in the interpretation or implementation of existing rules provide the space for them to redeploy
these rules in ways unanticipated by their designers. The ultimate fate
of the Auroux Reforms, a package of laws passed by a Socialist government in France in 1981, provides an example of this (Howell 1992).
These laws were designed to shore up the country’s historically weak
trade unions and strengthen collective bargaining by bolstering the
voice and power of labor at the plant level. However, as Chris Howell
(1992) shows, the paradoxical outcome was something like the opposite: in a context of economic crisis and deep antipathy on the part
of French employers toward organized labor, firms seized upon and
exploited ambiguities in the law to promote the development of firmspecific forms of labor representation that competed with unions –
thus in fact further marginalizing unions and weakening collective bargaining.11
In sum, we can generalize about the affinity between particular kinds
of actors and modes of change as follows: Insurrectionaries seek rapid
displacement but will settle for gradual displacement. Symbionts seek
to preserve the formal institutional status quo, but their parasitic variety carries out actions that cause institutional drift. Subversives seek
displacement but often work in the short run on behalf of layering.
Opportunists adopt a wait-and-see approach while pursuing conversion when it suits their interests.
10
11
We are grateful to Giovanni Capoccia for this insight.
Moreover, and consistent with the arguments laid out earlier, Howell (1992) traces
this result to ambiguities that were built into the law as a result of the complex
coalition that presided over its passage, which in this case fatefully included a minority of actors representing an older tradition within the French left committed to
worker self-management. Howell notes that “the final [legislative] package was . . . a
compromise and a hodge-podge of elements” (p. 183), and he attributes its paradoxical effects to “a certain plasticity of law” in which key provisions became “Trojan
horses” for strategies that were antithetical to the law’s express purposes (pp. 182,
185).
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
28
table 1.4. Contextual and Institutional Sources of Change Agents
Characteristics of the Targeted Institution
Low Level of
Discretion in
Interpretation/
Enforcement
Characteristics
of the Political
Context
Strong
Veto
Possibilities
Subversives
(layering)
Weak
Veto
Possibilities
Insurrectionaries
(Displacement)
High Level of
Discretion in
Interpretation/
Enforcement
Parasitic Symbionts
(drift)
Opportunists
(Conversion)
Link III: How Context and Institutions Shape Change Agents
Pulling together aspects of context and types of actors, we can also generate some general propositions concerning the kinds of environments
in which different agents are likely to emerge and thrive. As Table 1.4
suggests, the character of existing institutional rules and the prevailing political context are again the key explanatory factors. Change
agents become the intervening step through which the character of
institutional rules and political context do their causal work.
First, insurrectionaries can emerge in any setting, but they are more
likely to flourish in environments characterized by low discretion and
weak veto possibilities. Low discretion is quite compatible with strategies of outright displacement (as opposed to conversion or drift), while
fewer veto possibilities means that defenders of the status quo who
can be expected to resist change will not be well positioned to counter
insurgent efforts aimed at displacement.
Second, symbionts of the parasitic variety are the mirror image of
this, thriving in environments characterized by strong veto possibilities
and high enforcement discretion. Since parasitic symbionts wish to
retain the formal institutional status quo, strong veto players (many
veto points) help to secure this outcome. At the same time, however,
parasitic symbionts need high discretion in enforcement, because this
allows them room to alter the valence and meaning of institutionalized
rules.
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
29
Third, subversives can be expected to emerge and thrive in contexts
in which the existence of strong veto possibilities and few rule interpretation and enactment opportunities makes it difficult for opposition
actors to openly break or even bend the rules of an institution. In this
environment, change agents must work within the system to achieve
their goals.
Finally, opportunists tend to thrive in settings where there is a great
deal of discretion in how institutions are enacted and there are few
veto players or points to prevent actual institutional change. In this
setting, institutional supporters may turn a blind eye to those who
willfully convert institutions for their own purposes so long as they
do not oppose outright the institutional rules. Moreover, institutional
challengers do not need to pursue insurrectionary strategies since gaps
between rules and enactment are available for them to exploit. Rather
than oppose institutions outright, then, institutional challengers capture resources by acting as opportunists who redeploy the prevailing
rules for their own purposes.
Coalitional Dynamics and the Politics of Institutional Change
The foregoing discussion has developed broad propositions about the
conditions under which particular types of change agents are likely to
emerge as dominant, and it has also identified the kind of change that
is associated with each agent. In reality, of course, change agents often
do not work alone. Rather, they must act in concert with other institutional actors – other defenders and opponents of existing institutions.
Because of the status quo bias of institutions – rooted in Shepsle’s
(1986) “wedge of uncertainty” as well as in increasing returns to institutionalized power – the success of various kinds of agents in effecting
change typically depends crucially on the coalitions they are able to
deliberately forge or that emerge unexpectedly in the course of distributional struggle. As Peter Hall (this volume) notes, the relative power
of various actors is enormously important in affecting their ability to
assemble the coalition they need to change (or defend) existing arrangements. While these coalitions are inevitably shaped by the particular
setting in question, it is possible to make generalizations about how different transformative actors can and cannot forge alliances with those
who benefit and do not benefit from the prevailing rules. Table 1.5
presents the logic of these alignments by asking, broadly, whether a
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
30
table 1.5. Coalitional Alignments
Insurrectionaries
Symbionts
Subversives
Opportunists
Allies with Institutional
Supporters
Allies with Institutional
Challengers
No
Yes
No
Yes/No
Yes
No
No
Yes/No
given actor will seek alliances with an institution’s supporters or its
challengers, bearing in mind that part of the task is often to mobilize
latent defenders or opponents into action.
Some of the connections here are straightforward. For example, the
interests of insurrectionaries are by definition at odds with those of
the defenders of the status quo. Insurrectionaries must seek alliances
with other institutional challengers who have their own reasons (possibly substantively quite different) for opposing existing arrangements.
Opportunists, by contrast, are available for all kinds of alliances,
including alliances with insurrectionaries, depending on the political
winds. In fact, the success of insurgencies often depends crucially on
their forging an alliance with opportunists who are in principle not
committed to existing institutions. Opportunists can be brought into
such a coalition, however, only if insurrectionaries can convince them
that change is likely or even inevitable – at which point opportunists
will take up the insurgent cause. This is in fact one of the lessons
that emerged from the literature on the transition from communism in
Eastern Europe. Kuran (1991), for example, showed that the success
of prodemocracy forces hinged crucially on signs that a critical mass
of support for change had been assembled by the insurrectionaries;
as change began to appear more likely, citizens’ revealed preferences
shifted dramatically. Beissinger (2002) documents a similar “cascade”
effect in which a successful revolution in one region emboldened insurgents in neighboring countries and (we would add) in the process
brought opportunists into the alliance for change.
Other aspects of the coalitional politics implied by the framework
in this chapter are even more intriguing. For example, subversives
(such as those in Tulia Falleti’s chapter) need to work to the extent
possible under the radar of the dominant actors. This means that,
despite their preference for change, they may not align themselves
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A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change
31
(certainly not openly) with insurrectionaries. Instead, they work on
their own, behind the scenes or in the shadows. As Pierson pointed
out during our workshop, the effects are like those of “termites in the
basement” – the changes these actors have wrought may appear only
with a delay, and then come to light suddenly (in Falleti’s example,
with the transition to democracy), even though the process of change
itself was gradual.
Finally, symbionts are in some ways the most interesting of the
change agents we have explored here. In both varieties (mutualistic and
parasitic), the interests of symbionts are broadly consistent with (and
in many ways rely on) the preservation of status quo institutions. This
makes them ready allies of defenders of the status quo and opponents
of insurrectionaries. But because the substantive goals of symbionts
are frequently at odds with those of current institutional supporters,
strange coalitions can emerge. Alan Jacobs’s chapter provides a good
example of this type of “Baptist-bootlegger” coalition. In his account,
a key feature of the U.S. Social Security system – contributory financing – was jointly shored up in a period of instability (the 1950s) by
an unlikely alliance of social progressives and fiscal conservatives. For
progressives, contribution-based funding provided a compelling political and moral logic for maintaining and incrementally expanding the
program, while conservatives embraced this same feature for the way it
prevented that expansion from going too far. These kinds of alliances
are not uncommon for symbionts, who “come around” to supporting
institutions created by others and with different purposes in mind.
Conclusion
Building on previous conceptual work and harnessing the lessons
we can draw from the analysis of concrete instances of institutional
change, this chapter has presented a theory of gradual institutional
change. The argument emphasizes the interaction between features
of the political context and properties of the institutions themselves
as crucially important for explaining institutional change. It also calls
attention to the different types of change agents – and associated strategies – that are likely to flourish in particular institutional environments.
The theory suggests a potentially broad agenda and invites further research on gradual institutional change. It offers new concepts
and causal propositions for scholars to draw on and put to use in their
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32
James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen
own investigations. Indeed, rather than promote abstract debate about
metatheory or definitions, this framework is intended to stimulate and
aid in the substantive analysis of institutional change – whether in
individual cases or across sets of cases. Ultimately, the arguments we
have put forward can be evaluated only through the analysis of concrete cases and actual episodes of institutional change. Conversely,
it is through their application that the concepts and propositions we
advance can be further refined and elaborated.
Empirically assessing the theory in these substantive ways is something that can and should be carried out by institutionalists of all stripes
in the social sciences. Although we have built on ideas developed in the
field of historical institutionalism (and the chapters that follow originate mostly in that tradition as well), our propositions can be explored
with equal profit by sociological and rational-choice institutionalists.
Whatever the current disputes among scholars associated with alternative strands of institutionalism, their views are not so different as to
prohibit a common research agenda focused on gradual institutional
change. As Peter Hall’s concluding chapter suggests, institutional analysts from different schools all stand to benefit by combining their best
insights in the shared pursuit of valid explanation. Whatever extensions and revisions emerge from the use of the framework we have
laid out here, this volume will have served its purpose if it stimulates
more scholars to explore broad-ranging questions about gradual institutional change across diverse times and places.
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